Game theory has Austrian roots—Oskar Morgenstern was Mises’s doctoral student—but the way it’s taught leads almost everywhere to the same conclusion: individuals left alone reach bad outcomes, so the state must intervene. Lucas Engelhardt argues the reasoning has a hole in it. Standard analysis treats the game as fixed, when real people are entrepreneurial: alert to opportunity, able to see a bad equilibrium coming and restructure the payoffs before it arrives. Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026. Mises University is the world’s leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.